By DK, Riverd Founder. Last updated: 2026-08-25.
What to include on a massage intake form comes down to ten groups of information, and very little else: identity and emergency contact; health conditions and contraindications; current medications; pregnancy status; surgeries and injuries with rough dates; areas of concern; pressure preference; previous massage experience; a consent and policy acknowledgement; and a signature. Those ten cover almost every decision a soft-tissue session actually turns on, which is the test each field has to pass before it earns a place. The NCBTMB Standards of Practice expect a practitioner to obtain voluntary and informed consent before the session begins and to conduct an accurate needs assessment, and this set is what that looks like on paper. A form built on these ten is more useful than a longer questionnaire, because the questions that change your technique are not competing for attention with questions that change nothing.
What questions belong on a massage intake form?
Work through the ten groups in order. Each one below includes what the field is for, because a field whose purpose you cannot state is a field to cut.
Identity and emergency contact
Name, phone, email, and one emergency contact with a relationship. That is the whole administrative section. Emergency contact is the only part of it that is clinical: if a client feels faint on the table or has a reaction to a product, you want a name without hunting for one. Address is optional unless you do outcall work.
Health conditions and contraindications
This is the heart of the form. Ask about the categories that change technique rather than presenting a checklist of forty diagnoses. Circulatory conditions including high or low blood pressure, blood clots, and a history of deep vein thrombosis. Skin conditions, open wounds, and recent bruising. Neurological conditions including neuropathy and any loss of sensation. Diabetes. Cancer, current or in treatment. Osteoporosis. Recent fever or infection.
Each of these is a genuine contraindication or a precaution that changes pressure, positioning, or whether you work at all that day. The NCBTMB Standards of Practice ask practitioners to work within their scope and refer out when appropriate, and this section is what makes that judgment possible before the client is face-down.
Current medications
Ask about categories, not a complete list. Blood thinners change how easily a client bruises. Blood pressure medication affects how quickly they should sit up. Pain medication, including anything opioid, blunts the feedback you normally rely on to know you have gone too deep. Muscle relaxants do something similar. Naming those categories in the question gets you a useful answer where an open list field gets you a blank.
Pregnancy status
Ask everyone who could be pregnant, ask plainly, and say why. Pregnancy changes positioning, rules out some techniques, and makes trimester relevant. Prenatal work is within scope for most LMTs, and many states expect specific training for it, so this field is also how you know whether to refer. Include the reassurance that pregnancy is not a reason you cannot work together, because that one clause is what keeps first-trimester clients from leaving it blank.
Surgeries and injuries with dates
Ask for the site and roughly when. Rough is the right precision: "left knee, about two years ago" tells you what you need. Recent surgical sites are avoided; older ones may carry adhesions or scar tissue worth working with the client's consent. Old injuries explain compensation patterns you will feel and would otherwise misread.
Areas of concern
What brought them in, and where it hurts. Give this a text box and a body area list, because clients describe pain in wildly different vocabularies and one of the two formats will fit any given person. This is also where you learn whether the session is relaxation work or focused work, which changes how you plan the hour before you plan a single stroke.
Pressure preference
Skip the one-to-ten scale. A 7 means nothing shared between two people. Describe outcomes: relaxing pressure, pressure that works into a problem area, or something between. You calibrate at the table anyway; what you want from the form is the client's intent, not a number they invented.
Previous massage experience
One question, high value. A client who has had thirty massages needs different framing from a client who has never been on a table and does not know what draping means. This field is what tells you how much to explain before you start, and it is the single most commonly omitted useful question on massage intake forms.
Consent and policy acknowledgement
Your scope of practice, your draping practice, the client's right to stop or adjust at any moment, and your cancellation and late policy. Keep it short and in plain words. A consent paragraph a client actually reads is worth more than a page of dense text nobody finishes.
Signature
A typed name and a date, confirming the answers are accurate to the client's knowledge and that they have read the consent. On paper this is a pen line; on a digital form the client signs on their phone by typing their name.
How do you word an intake question so clients answer it honestly?
The short version: attach the reason to any question that asks for something private, and ask for the precision you actually need rather than the precision that looks rigorous. "Are you taking anything that thins your blood, affects your blood pressure, or changes how you feel pain?" outperforms "List all current medications" because it explains itself and forgives an imprecise answer.
Two structural rules help as much as wording. One question per line, so a client answering on a phone at the end of a workday cannot accidentally answer half of a compound question. And put the sensitive fields after the easy ones, because a person who has already filled six fields is far more likely to finish the seventh.
Wording is a deep subject and the other half of it is subtraction, which is a genuinely different skill from deciding what to include. We wrote about both separately: how to word intake questions and what to leave off covers the sensitive-question phrasing in detail and the case for cutting fields that never change a session.
Paper form or digital intake form?
Paper works, and plenty of practices run on it. Its real cost is not the clipboard. It is the ten minutes at the start of a first session, when a client is sitting in a chair with a pen instead of on the table, and you are reading their medication list for the first time with no chance to look anything up or ask a follow-up before you begin.
A digital intake form moves that reading to the day before. You see the pregnancy answer, the blood thinner, and the shoulder surgery while you still have time to think about them. It also fixes the two failure modes paper has no answer for: the illegible handwriting you decide to interpret rather than ask about, and the form that gets filled once in 2022 and never again.
The tradeoff is real in the other direction. Some clients, particularly older ones, would rather have paper, and a practice that forces a link on someone who does not want one loses more than it gains. Most practices end up running digital as the default with paper available.
Consider a solo LMT in Savannah, composited here from how a mixed-caseload practice actually runs, who moved to digital intake after a client disclosed a recent knee replacement on the clipboard four minutes before the session. She had already planned prone work with a bolster under the ankles. The information was there, on the form, on time by the letter of it, and useless in practice. Nothing went wrong. It just did not have to be that close.
How do you get the form filled before the client arrives?
Send it when they book, not the night before. A client who has just committed to an appointment is at their peak willingness to do the small task attached to it, and a form that arrives at booking gets filled at a much higher rate than one that arrives twelve hours out. Follow up once, gently, if it is still outstanding a day ahead.
Make it fillable on a phone with no account and no download. Every login screen between the client and the first question is a place people stop. And keep it short, which is the same argument as the ten groups above: completion rate falls with length, and a nine-question form that gets finished beats a twenty-question form that gets abandoned on page two.
Riverd includes client intake forms on every plan. A ready-made clinical massage intake is set up on day one covering the groups above, you change it by describing the change in plain words rather than dragging fields around, and it can send itself when a new client books their first session. Clients fill it on their phone with no account and sign with a typed name, and the signed form lands on both the client record and the booking. Brook and River include three form types with unlimited sends, and Fjord has unlimited form types. Available to US practices at launch.
The form is the starting point rather than the finish. What a client writes down is confirmed and expanded in the first few minutes of the session, and the intake conversation script covers how to run that without it feeling like an interrogation. For the wider set of decisions around opening and running a solo practice, our complete practice guide for massage therapists puts intake in context, and the rest of our writing on the client relationship is in the client experience hub.
Key Takeaways
- Ten groups cover a massage intake form: identity and emergency contact, conditions, medications, pregnancy, surgeries and injuries, areas of concern, pressure, previous experience, consent, and signature.
- Ask about medication categories that change technique rather than requesting a complete list.
- Describe pressure in outcomes rather than a one-to-ten scale, which means nothing shared between two people.
- Send the form at booking rather than the night before, and make it fillable on a phone with no account.
This is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Contraindications, scope of practice, and consent requirements vary by state and by modality; check your own licensing board and your professional association's current guidance.
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